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Wednesday, May 26, 2010

So continuing on that one about evolution....Well... There are all these theories about how man evolved. However, what is more interesting is not "how did man evolve", but "why". There are billions of creatures on planet Earth and some of them with really interesting features (like the ciliates, about which I started a post and never published!) and yet, none of them achieved what man did! (Or maybe they did, but that is a premise I don't want to talk about today).

WHY did man become the most powerful creature? What in him that wasn't there in other creatures made him invent computers and visualize robots, and make artificial cell cultures?

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Aha! How flies time! Before I know it a month is gone! (I wanted to put some awesome Shakespeare line, which talks about time stealing away from him, but I don't remember the exact words! Will be grateful to anyone who can point that out...)

And before I move on to the post- link of the day- An extract from "At home" by Bill Bryson.... VERY interesting...

So the update goes thus-- I am back from my vacation. And am into the normal mode- work, eat, sleep, read novels, etc. Was reading Jonathan Stroud. Expect a review on that one. And that apart, I have been reading online. Lot of random stuff. Mostly... It even surprises me that there are so many things to write about in this world!

And having mentioned Shakespeare and writing, I should quite automatically slide into .... grammar. Most people who have argued with me, would have been horribly irritated by my constant correction of grammatical errors. (Like when you are explaining the most irrefutable point you have got to make, I go "It's not with, it is by!" I know it kinda gets on your nerves, but I have some sorta automatic grammar sensor in my head which goes beeping [and which sometimes turns off, if the speaker has an absolute lack of grammar-- some things are beyond repair!] In any case, I have mostly been particular...

So then it surprised me when a quest across OUP blog, visual thesaurus, etc. made me find a very obvious (but not so obvious till then) grammatical mistake I tend to make. And quite often.

It was the use of the word hopefully. I have often used it (but luckily, not on this blog) to mean "I hope" e.g. "Hopefully, I will write more on this topic". However, the actually meaning of the word "hopefully" is "full of hope". So in the previous sentence while I intended to say "I hope I will write more on this topic", I ended up saying "I will write more on this topic full of hope" (which was OK, if I had been talking about the recession etc :D) In any case, this discovery led me to discover a class of words said to be skunked (no, not the animal). But more on that one 2 weeks from now (Thinking of doing a regular grammar update every alternate week. But don't know if that will materialize...) Anyway, will at least get back on skunked words soon... Hopefully... (Ahem!)

P.S. - Aha! The title, (X CBSE students of 2003 batch and earlier might remember) is from Ogden Nash's dentist poem "This is going to hurt just a little bit". While the poem wasn't great, I had liked this particular line, and also the part about the vicious circle....